Enlightening article, Aaron, and well-written as always. I never did understand why the marketing of very good (if esoteric) captive imports was assigned to divisions whose dealerships their target buyers pretty much found repellent. Opel never had a chance while yoked to Buick, just as Mercury hadn't a clue how to sell Capri.

Speaking of which, I hope you'll write about the Merkur XR4Ti/Scorpio debacle.

I think many of these pairings reflect the push-me/pull-you relationship between automakers and dealers. Dealers tend to get pushy when they don't have something to sell in a particular class, and they don't necessarily think very far ahead -- if you're selling cars, your priority is selling cars now, not three years from now.

The Buick/Opel pairing came about during the Eisenhower recession in 1957. Buick was in a bad way at that point. They had let their production capacity overwhelm their quality control (gee, does that sound familiar?), the public was bored with the styling of the '57 and disliked the '58, and sales plummeted. As the recession deepened, mid-priced cars in general became abruptly unpopular. I'm assuming that Buick's sales organization got a lot of screaming from dealers that they had nothing to sell. Buick started working on the first Y-body Special, but it wasn't going to be ready for a couple of years, so the Opel Olympia Rekord was a stopgap. Buick dealers sold a modest number of them, but they didn't like the idea of investing a lot of money in parts and training to fix them, and individual salesmen would rather sell a Buick, with the prospect of a much higher commission. The same happened with the Vauxhalls sold by Pontiac.

(By the late sixties, Opel would have been a better fit with Pontiac, but I'm not sure Pontiac dealers would have done any better selling them than Buick dealers were.)

With the Capri, you can see the logic, just as you can see why it didn't work. If they'd badged it as a Ford, it would have competed directly with the Pinto, the Maverick, and the Mustang; Ford already had a problem with each new model cannibalizing its existing products. Lincoln-Mercury was a different story. L-M was moving the Cougar into the personal luxury class, so it was aimed more at the Monte Carlo and Grand Prix than the Mustang, and Mercury didn't have a Pinto equivalent. (The Bobcat didn't arrive until 1975.) I'm sure the idea of bringing over the Capri 1600 seemed like a great way to kill two birds with one stone -- a junior sporty car to fill the gap left by the Cougar, and a compact economy car to fill in for the Pinto.

I think the Capri suffered two major problems in the U.S., aside from a more crowded market. First, Matt McLaughlin, who was L-M general manager when it was introduced, didn't think Mercury should do sporty cars. He felt it was too much of a stretch from Mercury's existing brand. Second, there was the inevitable "not invented here" problem. If L-M had marketed the Capri the way it was marketed in Europe -- with a fuller range of models and engines -- it could have been very successful here, but I don't think L-M (either the division or the dealers) ever really saw it as their car.

Very good article about the European Capri. I spotted a interesting variant of the Ford Taunus TC(who borrowed lots of styling cues from the Cortina MkIII) in Argentina, a coupe version in fastback style similar in design to the Capri, http://www.clubtaunus.com.ar/English/History_Taunus-Arg.htm I don't know what they didn't used the Capri moniker there however.

The Capri wasn't really viewed as a bona fide sports car , in the same way as an MGB-GT , since in basic 1300 or 1600 form it had no performance and little glamour. The 3-Litre V6 was a serious piece of kit, but lesser versions were simply fancy Cortinas , and they didn't have the competition pedigree or street cred of the Cortina.

Well, the analogy to the American Mustang is quite pronounced. You could make the Mustang into a credible competition car, but the basic six-cylinder Mustang was little more than a sportier-looking Falcon Futura, with less rear-seat and boot space. (The Mustang's body had less structural commonality with the Falcon than the Capri did with the Cortina, but in hardware and specifications, the point remains.) Even in the States, few people would have called the Mustang a proper sports car; in the vernacular of the time, it was a "sporty car," a subtle but important distinction.

Where the analogy breaks down a bit is in the fact that, as you say, Ford managed to establish a fair pedigree for the Cortina, with the Lotus Cortina and GT. By contrast, while the American Falcon became a serious rally competitor in '63-'64, Ford's efforts to sell a performance-oriented Falcon in the U.S. came up short. (It would fall to Ford Australia to make that particular equation work.)

It would be interesting to compare the sales for the sporty Cortinas to those of the lesser Capris. There are always those who are more interested in performance than style and vice versa, and I would be curious to see which was larger at that point. I would suspect the Capri, but I don't know offhand.